In this edition of the newsletter, I’m thinking about two very different movies that have gotten under my skin for similar reasons. Tár is my favorite film of 2022 and the one I wanted to win Best Picture: it stars Cate Blanchet as a celebrated symphony conductor who experiences a fall from fame due to a series of scandals. Let The Right One In is a 2008 Swedish film that has since been remade in English as a film and as a TV series. The film follows two children, Oskar who is a bullied outcast and Eli who is a vampire that befriends him. In both films, I struggle to align my mental moral judgments with my feelings - in ways that I find deeply troubling.
(Cate Blanchet as Lydia Tár - the problematic leader who exudes charisma in every frame.)
But before I jump into my analysis, some items to note. First, HBO just released a new trailer for the upcoming season of True Detective (link here) that is set in Alaska and is starring Jodie Foster. Each season of this show is a standalone story: Season 1 remains some of the best television of all time while Seasons 2 and 3 are flawed, skippable, and forgettable. Here’s hoping that this latest season breathes new life into the series.
Second, SNL absolutely skewered those of us who are following the Trump indictment drama too closely. It’s one of their best politically responsive skits in years. (Link.)
Third, per the most recent Jobs Report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Black unemployment (5%) is the lowest it has ever been, due in large part to the tight labor market.
Fourth, in contrast to the happy news above, this is a sobering image from the NYT showing how most of the pandemic-era social safety net programs have ended or are ending. The U.S. Built a European-Style Welfare State. It’s Largely Over. - The New York Times (nytimes.com) - If we are indeed headed for a recession, I worry about how low-income families may fare. Hopefully there is still opportunity for bipartisan consensus on a Child Tax Credit.
Recognizing Evil at The Affective Level
Let The Right One gave me nightmares in a way I’ve never experienced before. My nightmares were not a series of images flashing through my mind, or a reenacting of the plot with my family and I in place of the film’s characters. Instead, the nightmare was an impression: my own deep vulnerability in the face of evil that could masquerade as good.
In the film, we are introduced to Oskar, a boy who lives in abject poverty and social isolation and who is brutally bullied by his peers. When Oskar is befriended by a 12 year old girl his age named Eli, we watch him slowly gain confidence and experience happiness for what seems like the first time in his life. But Eli is not a 12 year old girl: she’s a vampire, and indeed early in the film, we watch her violently kill innocent people to feed herself. These fleeting moments of chilling violence are juxtaposed with what is otherwise a deeply affecting and romantic story about two children exploring the external world and their own interiority.
The ending of the film - which I won’t spoil - is presented as happy on the surface. Indeed, it was only after thinking about the film at length that I was able to realize the more likely interpretation of what I had seen in that ending. Suffice to say, while there are still some critics who read the film (and the novel the film is based on) as a sweet but strange coming-of-age story, others have identified it as being a harrowing look at the process of grooming and predation with some even suggesting the subtext of the story is about pedophilia.
Ultimately, what makes this film haunt me is the unshakeable feeling that I had stared in the face of evil, that conceptually I could identify and understand that evil - and yet at every point I could not bring myself to feel it, to feel that the evil was indeed evil and not the good that it masqueraded as. I felt preyed upon myself, with my emotions fully vulnerable to the same manipulations shown on screen.
More than a decade has passed since Let The Right One In was released, and at least 5 or more years have passed since I’ve watched it. And yet I find myself thinking about the film again in conversation with a totally different film that was just released last year.
I knew I was going to love Tár from the opening scene in which the protagonist is seated for an interview at the New Yorker festival and opines on classical music, declaring that conductors such as herself can control time itself. Another early scene stands out as solidifying my love for the film in which Lydia Tár eviscerates an Ivy League music student for strenuously objecting to the idea that Beethoven, a straight white man, could have something to teach BIPOC students in the 21st century.
Lydia is bold, educated, self-assured, and passionate: she commands every room with her presence, and the way she projects power when standing before the symphony really does make it seem like time itself is at her beck and call. And Lydia truly cares about classical music — I instinctively connected her to all the mentors in my life who unabashedly defend beauty and the liberal arts in contexts that are so often utilitarian.
Every aspect of Lydia’s character is a rebuff to the philistine spirit that despises art or that seeks to make it fully democratic and eliminate all standards or judgments of highbrow versus lowbrow. And she stands as a rebuff to the ever-present Judas impulse that scolds liberal arts lovers for their decadence, that says, “you could have sold that bottle of perfume and given the proceeds to the poor rather than wasting it on the feet of Christ,” and attacks any humanities professor or student who is not a sufficiently reliable social justice warrior.
But Lydia is also a predator, full stop. Despite being married to a loving wife, Lydia consistently uses her status and power to groom younger women. She wields her ability to advance or stymie careers as carrot and stick and treats everyone around her as means to her ends. When people stop being instrumentally valuable to her, she discards them and moves on to the next.
The film shows us ample examples of her bad behavior, and as noted in a New Yorker review (one that I ultimately think misinterprets the film), the film also intentionally blurs the image of predation to make it harder to root against her.
The conductor James Levine was fired from the Metropolitan Opera in 2018 following accusations that he had sexually abused four men—students of his—three of them when they were teen-agers. The conductor Charles Dutoit resigned his post with London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra that same year after he was accused of sexual assault by several women. (Both men denied the accusations.)
In Todd Field’s film “Tár,” starring Cate Blanchett as an orchestra conductor named Lydia Tár, both men are mentioned, by an elderly male retired conductor, as objects of his sympathy. This peripheral character’s remark should hardly be taken for the writer and director’s point of view—except that the drama is centered on accusations of improprieties levied against Lydia and presents her as a victim. The movie scoots rapidly by the accusations she faces; it blurs the details, eliminates the narratives, merely sketches hearings, leaves crucial events offscreen, and offers a calculated measure of doubt, in order to present her accusers as unhinged and hysterical and the protesters gathered against her as frantic and goofy.
Contrary to the New Yorker article and to other critics who have said the film is critiquing cancel culture, I think the film is very clear that regardless of the exact extent of her moral/legal culpability, Lydia is a bad person who abuses her power. Moreover, I think the film asks its viewers to consider how Lydia and others like are enabled to abuse power because of their celebrity, charisma, talent, and status. I think the film also wants us to think about how Lydia and those like her are shielded from accountability. In the same way that we use scripts about the tortured male genius to launder the reputation of abusers like David Foster Wallace, the people around Lydia have a vested interest in not seeing the patterns before them - until everything can no longer be contained, and it all spills out in the open.
I think if genders were reversed, it could be easier for me to feel in my bones that Lydia and Eli are predators. I run into this same affective shortcoming when I read newspaper stories about school staff having sex with minors. When it’s a male teaching having sex with a 17 year old girl, I can immediately feel that this is abusive and harmful. But when it’s a female teacher and a 17 year old boy, while I still know it’s wrong and harmful, it doesn’t feel as bad. (SNL did a skit about this very phenomenon in 2015.) This is probably indicative of harmful ways that we think about gender: conceptions of agency, vulnerability, normativity, etc., that should be interrogated.
But even aside from gender, I think there’s at least two other reasons that it’s hard for me to feel that Lydia and Eli are predators. First, I am drawn to their power, both in terms of sense of self and confidence and also in terms of how they seem to shape the world rather than being shaped by it. Let The Right One really blurs this dynamic because we are made to emphasize so deeply with Oskar’s powerlessness and the suffering that results from his vulnerability that we are reminded of our own vulnerabilities, and this makes us more susceptible to desiring power. But St. Augustine was also right to name the “will to dominate” as a recurring pathology of our fallen sinful nature. There is something alluring about the status itself of having power over others - and here I think about Edmund’s attraction to the White Witch in Naria as a powerful example of that pathology in action. Put another way, I think our own corruption registers on the level of our affections (a central theme in Dante), thereby making it all the more challenging to recognize and confront evil in ourselves and in others.
But the second reason I think it’s hard to see Lydia and Eli as predators is because of their virtue-signaling. I want to be clear that I’m not using that phrase in the superficial sense of putting “In this house, we believe in science” signs in the yard. I’m thinking more about Jonathan Haidt’s work on social psychology: the way we signal our allegiances, commitments, values, etc., help to connect us as members in the social tribes that we care about. And in the case of Eli and Lydia, both are constantly signaling their defense of values (or in the case of Eli, persons) that I care about. It’s precisely because I see them as being on my team - against the bullies, against the philistines, against those who misunderstand or dismiss what I love and value - that I motivated to ignore, overlook, or underweight all the evidence that would otherwise force me to cut ties, declaim, or prosecute.
Again, to be clear, what I know and what I feel are at odds, and simply adding more intellectual knowledge alone cannot square the circle. Instead, in order to resolve the dissonance, my affects need to be adjusted, my feelings need to be brought into alignment with my mental models in order for my moral judgments to operate fully as they ought. In most religious traditions, we call this the work of conversion - not simply a one-time mental assent, but a gradual lifelong process to orient one’s whole self (thoughts, words, deeds; emotions and desires) to align with the Good.
Without spoiling the ending of Tár, I do think there’s hope for Lydia’s redemption. She experiences a stripping away of all that enabled her behavior, and there’s a scene that suggests a moment of self-realization about her own depravity. Similar to the stories of Flannery O’Connor, such rock bottom experiences are often the prerequisite for moral growth, if only we are able to accept the grace that is offered to us in that work of renunciation, humiliation, and suffering that is so often required in the process of conversion. (Read more about that interpretation here, but only after you’ve watched the film.) And similarly, I hope that for myself, these films offer opportunities to interrogate myself, to identify places where grace is being offered to reorient my affections and align me with the Good.
What I Am Reading Elsewhere:
In The New Republic, Ian Beacock reviews the late anthropologist David Graeber’s final book that explores whether pirates helped to pioneer democracy. The topic itself is interesting but this review is also interesting as an exercise in thinking about historiography and the purposes of history writing.
I will confess that I was very skeptical of the idea of Opportunity Zones as a way of driving investment into distressed geographies. But the preliminary data suggests that the program has been a qualified success. New analysis from the Economic Innovation Group finds that “Opportunity Zones have already achieved a combination of expansive geographic reach, large-scale private investment, and significant economic effects that is unique in the history of U.S. place-based policy.”
My former boss Andre Perry at the Brookings Institution has published a new analysis showing that even when controlling for income, Black neighborhoods have less access to premium grocery stores like Whole Foods and Trader Joes and are instead highly saturated with Dollar Stores.
Speaking of Brookings, the Economic Program recently hosted a panel on how automation will affect workers featuring the nation’s leading labor economist in conversation with two AI systems. It’s amazing, weird, and unforgettable. You can read the summary and transcript of the conversation here.
Matthew Desmond has a new book out on understanding poverty in the U.S. and has been publishing some articles in the NYT and elsewhere. While policy wonks have taken issue with the measures of poverty that he relies on, I find his conceptual framing of poverty to be helpful: “When we don’t own property or can’t access credit, we become dependent on people who do and can, which invites exploitation...Our vulnerability grows as our liberty shrinks."
In Foreign Policy, Jonathan Askonas - a politics professor at Catholic U - writes about the recent military intelligence leak as illustrative of a broader trend in lonely young people seeking attention and community online: “Internet communities operate as gift economies, where one’s status is largely determined by the valuable content one brings to the community—spicy memes, obscure videos, interesting links, or secrets. Interviews with Teixeira’s friends trace an evolution: He began by posting summaries of classified secrets he had access to, establishing himself as a person worth knowing, a real-life Jason Bourne. This earned him something of a fandom. Younger members absorbed not only the secrets he relayed but also OG’s opinions about them, which included conspiracy theories. When his fans’ attention seemed to flag, he apparently grew frustrated and began posting images of documents directly.”